Transmission bandwidth demands in telecommunication networks (e.g., the Internet) appear to be ever increasing and solutions are being sought to support this bandwidth demand. One solution to this problem is to use fiber-optic networks, where wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) technology is used to support the ever-growing demand in optical networks for higher data rates.
Conventional optical switched networks typically use wavelength routing techniques, which require that optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversion of optical signals is done at the optical switches. Performing OEO conversion at each switching node in the optical network is not only a relatively slow operation (typically about ten milliseconds), but is also very costly, consumes a lot of power, and potentially creates a traffic bottleneck for the optical switched network. In addition, the current optical switch technologies cannot efficiently support “bursty” traffic that is often experienced in packet communication applications (e.g., the Internet).
It may be possible to create a network where the OEO conversion at the switching nodes need not be performed. In such a case, the data traffic maybe electronically buffered at the ingress/egress nodes, and their transmission to egress/ingress nodes is placed upon network schedulers. Prior art bandwidth reservation mechanisms may not be adequate for enterprise networks to support the requested bandwidths, as they did not take into account the specific network topology and available resources such as the number of active wavelengths permitted, the lightpath utilization, and many other network parameters.